


Dim the Lights

by starlurker



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-16
Updated: 2010-10-16
Packaged: 2017-10-12 17:28:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/127243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlurker/pseuds/starlurker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur is doing well, all things considered.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dim the Lights

**Author's Note:**

> From the Inception Kink meme. The prompt was for this line: "This isn't real," he shakes his head, eyes bright, "you're dead."
> 
> Some differences from the original due to clean-up.

The con involved an artist who worked with mixed media in Toronto and his subconscious was a challenge for all of them, especially with a new forger and extractor. Noguchi was brilliant in all the ways Eames was, but less abrasive in certain respects, more malleable in others. He had a sly sense of humor that he unleashed at just the right moments, had a passion for Broadway musicals -- one of his kicks was _Losing My Mind_ by Sondheim -- and had standing Sunday dinners with his parents, provided he wasn't working. Noguchi also maintained a healthy distance from Arthur, which Arthur thought was either Ariadne's or Yusuf's doing.

Six months had passed when Saito asked him if he was interested in being a point man again, after the incident that everyone seemed to treat as if it happened to someone else. Saito informed Arthur that he had found a brilliant forger prospect in Sapporo, that he had found another extractor to take over where Dom left off. It was clear that Saito was picking people who were completely different as replacements: Fatimah was the epitome of foul-mouthed cool and the quality of her suits rivalled even Arthur's. She had no time for bullshit and bluntly asked Arthur the question that he thought everyone had wanted to ask since he was brought in:

"Do you have your shit together, or will we have to hold it together for you once we're in?"

Well, Ariadne probably would have phrased that better. Yusuf would have spoken to him in a dream. Saito had already answered the question for himself without asking -- he wouldn't have offered the job if he thought Arthur was incapable.

He had looked at Fatimah when she asked, met her eyes dead on and said yes.

***

Eames was hit by a drunk driver in London. He was in critical condition for two days, lapsed into a coma that lasted for a week, then quietly passed away in his sleep.

Arthur hated that he died so commonly. It should have been a mark who was full of hatred, an old military connection gone rogue, or a gambling fight gone wrong.

The last words Arthur said to Eames were _see if you can pick up extra clips for the Xianghao job_. He didn't hear Eames' last words, which were muffled by the door closing and the sound of the faucet as Arthur washed his coffee cup.

***

The mark was an artist named Johan Ebersole. His work was full of vivid dream imagery and the thinking behind this job was that he was a civilian who had somehow gained access to a PASIV, but combined hallucinogenic compounds with his Somnacin. His paintings were obscene and beautiful and bizarre. Arthur couldn't take his eyes off of them when he was researching the mark as he wandered the halls of the Art Gallery of Ontario. He lost himself in the swirl of colors and noticed that it had that effect on a lot of people. The paintings were certainly immersive enough that he rolled his dice two times in the bathroom just to check.

Ariadne came with him to see Frank Gehry's renovation of the gallery and to do her own research for the mark.

"I don't know if I can duplicate what this guy's dream would be," she said.

"Why?"

"Because these paintings don't make any sense. This guy is doing stuff I've never seen before."

Arthur looked at her in confusion. "How would that affect his dream?"

Ariadne bit her lip. "He might be able to change the rules."

"You mean you think he has training? I would have figured that out."

"Yeah," she said hesitantly.

"Don't bring up Fischer." He thought they were all past that.

"It's not that," she said. "I just think this guy can change the rules in way we don't expect."

***

Ariadne was right about the difficulty. Most of their marks had houses, villages, malls, army bases, office buildings as the location of their dream. Ebersole had a floating silver disk adrift in space, a greenish dome providing shelter from the sun's rays while maintaining the oxygen. Arthur found out that Ebersole traveled for most of his life and had no home as a child except the hotels that his parents brought him to, so he created an imaginary world that he could cling to while everything else around him changed.

"This guy's fucked in the head," Fatimah said. "Thank fuck it's just one level deep. Who the hell are we all supposed to be in this set-up?" She flipped her long braid of black hair over her shoulder impatiently.

"And how am I going to be anyone if who we're going to be isn't real?" Noguchi asked. Arthur was getting better at only having a second's pause in his mind when there was no London accent. He chose to lay out all his copies of Ebersole's childhood sketch pads and notebooks with precise deliberation. All the material was devoted to the ecology, climate, politics and citizens of Vert Terre, Ebersole's name for his imaginary place.

"We read all this," Arthur said, "and figure it out from there."

"Great," Ariadne said, and grabbed one of the notebooks. "Listen to this: _Vert Terre has a population of 3,000 with 2,998 evenly split between the two genders. Two positions are exalted. Regent Ebersole rules along with Regentess Zaleria._ " She rolled her eyes. "What is with the letter Z in all these geeky things anyway?"

"We know who Noguchi will be then," Yusuf said. He flipped through one of the notebooks and pointed out one of Ebersole's sketches of the Regentess, the figure clothed in what looked like high fashion sheer bondage gear. "I'm shocked," he said. "I expected her breasts to be bigger."

Noguchi put his face in his hands. "What the hell am I supposed to do with that? How am I going to duplicate that outfit?"

Eames would have figured it out, Arthur thought distantly.

"I think we all know this job will need a lot of improvisation," Fatimah said.

"From what I've gathered," Arthur said, "the mark is more receptive to a lot of things changing. Vert Terre kept changing as he grew up because he kept adding ideas to it, so as long as we have a firm grasp on the basics, we should be OK." He got one of the notebooks with his color coded mark in it. "Listen to this part," he said. " _Vert Terre believes in the quarzzha, the principle of sharing weakness and pain. If one citizen suffers, the rest of the population will feel it. This principle allows the citizens a safe and happy existence since they will literally hurt themselves and their loved ones if they commit a violent crime._ "

"And that's enough of that fucking weirdness," Fatimah said. "Let's call this a wrap for tonight. We have a lot of reading to do in the next couple of weeks."

***

Ariadne had been a rock throughout the entire ordeal, from the hospital to the funeral to the cemetery. She made him chicken noodle soup, chose the suit for the body and was one of two people who could make him smile on occasion.

Dom called almost every day and flew in for the funeral. "I know how this feels," he had said to Arthur, and Arthur almost lost it then. He hung on though, just barely, Dom's hand on his shoulder a soothing touch.

Saito had sent a _kaimyo_ he had picked out himself for Eames' posthumous name.

"Eames wasn't his real name either," Arthur had said over the phone during one of his more lucid moments. "And he wasn't Buddhist."

"But Eames was the name that fit," Saito said. "So his new name has to be different." He ignored everything else that didn't concern him in his usual Saito way.

Arthur and Yusuf grieved together for the man both of them knew best. Yusuf told stories about their adventures in Mombasa. Arthur told him stories about London and Accra and Copenhagen, Manila and San Francisco and Stockholm. If Ariadne was the rock, Yusuf was the water that let Arthur coast on top and they kept each other afloat as often as they could.

***

One of Arthur's pastimes with Eames had been the vocabulary game, which they had played in between jobs and during those nights when doing more work was out of the question. It started because Arthur was trying to become more of a Londoner, which had merited Eames' most skeptical face. Arthur always remembered this one, which happened on a strangely blurry day and began with an unremarkable breakfast, Eames with pillow lines that hadn't yet faded completely and Arthur with sleep crust in the corner of his left eye.

"Fringe?" Eames asked out of the blue. He was wearing boxers with happy faces on them.

"Bangs," Arthur responded, and wondered how quickly those boxers would be cast aside. This game they played had rhythms they were both intimately familiar with.

"Jumper?"

"Sweater."

"Boot."

"Trunk."

"Petrol."

"Gas."

Eames had looked at him lasciviously, and Arthur knew it was coming.

"Bugger," Eames said, exaggerating his accent.

"What you should do to me right now," Arthur said, smiling.

"Don't mind if I do, darling," Eames said, and tackled Arthur to the floor.

***

As difficult as it was to set up the dream, the actual invasion to see what Ebersole was hiding turned out to be surprisingly easy. He was used to a lot of things changing because he changed them himself -- the unwritten rule of Vert Terre was that only he could change the place, so with his creativity as a cover, Fatimah, Ariadne and Arthur were able to infiltrate his dream world easily.

Noguchi had no such luck. Not that Arthur could blame him. Ebersole kept looking at Noguchi's impersonation of Zaleria strangely for the last couple of minutes, but luckily, Noguchi had already obtained significant clues about the secret's location, if not the actual spot. Arthur gave it ten more minutes before the subconscious went crazy. Luckily, Fatimah said she only needed seven to extract the secret. With Ariadne helping, it was probably going to be shorter. Both of them were already trying to crack the riddle to open the sealed box, Arthur and Noguchi watching out for them, Noguchi relieved to be out of the difficult forgery.

Things never worked out that easily in his experience, but Arthur was prepared for all eventualities. The citizens of Vert Terre turned, each of them armed with a strange silver knife. That he expected. The silver disk Vert Terre rested on started tilting on an angle to Arthur's disadvantage, its citizens gaining higher ground. That part was a surprise.

"We need one more minute," Ariadne said. "Cover us." They were in the fringes of the bizarre world, a part with crystalline trees that glowed like fireflies with dense, near impenetrable trunks. Protecting them would be easier.

"Don't kill the projections," Arthur instructed Noguchi. "You'll kill the mark too. Aim for limbs." He dreamed up a machine gun, which the projections looked at strangely. Noguchi came up with his own weaponry.

It soon turned into a bloodbath, full of wounded people crawling along in agony but slithering forward with injured arms and legs, sliding relentlessly towards Arthur even as they all felt each other's pain. Their blood was flowing down as well, a viscuous and burnt-looking flood of red. Arthur, no matter how good he was at his job, couldn't take on all of approaching people, even with Noguchi's help. It was inevitable that the projections would soon start hurling knives when they got shot down. He didn't see the silver knife flung his way, the one that pierced his left lung and left him gasping in shock.

"Arthur!" Ariadne screamed.

He spit out blood as he stumbled backwards, one step, two steps, until he hit a body. The person wrapped an arm around his waist to keep him steady.

"You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling."

Arthur stared straight ahead, the gruesome sight before him fading, and did his best to ignore how good and how _right_ the body behind him felt. "This isn't real," he shook his head, sight blurring into a shimmering field, "you're dead." His vision cleared in time only to see Ariadne's heartbroken expression. He felt his face crumple, his chest constrict, his stomach rebel.

"I have it!" Fatimah said, raising her arms in triumph only to stop short at the sight before her.

Arthur turned to face him, his beautiful, wonderful, miraculous projection.

"Kill me," Arthur said, and waited for the kick.

THE END


End file.
